Compost project
finds right recipe

By Jessica Edwards

Sixth-graders at the Haines School are turning leftover cheeseburgers, peanut-butter-and-jelly-sandwiches, egg rolls, green beans, and other lunch scraps into dirt, and learning how food waste can be recycled for growing vegetables and other plants instead of rotting in a landfill.

“Now they know much of what they throw away isn’t useless,” said Pam Randles, education coordinator for the Takshanuk Watershed Council. “It’s a way to grow more food.”

“I think it’s really fun,” said sixth-grader Alexandria Chapin about composting school lunch. “Instead of putting things in the landfill, where it doesn’t get any use, you can compost it and reuse it and reuse it.”

Meat and dairy traditionally have been excluded from Alaskan compost heaps, but Randles said successfully composting hot dogs and hamburgers is a matter of getting the right compost “recipe.”

Randles is spearheading the school lunch compost program, a daily science exercise with sixth graders, who help other students separate food scraps from plastics and other wrappers after lunch and then take the leftover food to feed “Marvin,” as they’ve dubbed their compost project.

Compost is, after all, a living organism.

Randles said most people didn’t compost meat because of the unpleasant odor it produces during decomposition, and the likelihood of attracting insects and other critters.

“Meat smells and it attracts bears. It’s not that it doesn’t compost – ultimately everything does compost – it just doesn’t do it as nicely unless you get the recipe right.”

Though there isn’t much literature about composting meat, Randles was determined to figure it out. She wanted the program to be a success, and while students could be expected to sort plastics and other slow bio-degraders from food, they couldn’t be expected to separate the hamburger patty and cheese from the bun.

The program launched in January, and Randles didn’t have a working recipe. While the food did compost, “It stank, and attracted flies.”

This fall, Randles hit on the magic ratio: four gallons food, a nitrogen source, to four gallons equal parts paper and sawdust, both carbon sources. Heat-loving bacteria and fungus worked quickly to break down the food. The recipe significantly reduced the unpleasant smell, making it less likely to attract animals and more pleasant for students to work with.

Sixth-grade students in Tennie Bentz’s class said the compost is still slightly stinky, but has improved a great deal.

The students take turns performing food-sorting and composting duties, which takes about 20 minutes after lunch.

Bailey Stuart, Bonnie Oleson, and Maggie Martin were on duty Friday. Without instruction, they collected the black plastic trash bags, into which other students had scraped food scraps, and shuttled them to a concrete staging area behind the school. They dumped the food from the bags into a plastic tote.

Donning rubber gloves, Stuart and Martin dove into the scraps, sorting through rice, peas, bits of orange, egg rolls, half-eaten sandwiches and removing bits of plastic and foil wrappers – anything that won’t break down quickly in the compost bins.

Stuart marveled at untouched food that had been thrown away. “These egg rolls were pretty good, too.”

After sorting the scraps, the students and Randles hauled the tote to a composting shed behind the old primary school.

Three octagonal composting bins, donated by Haines Friends of Recycling, line the wall. Along the other side is a container of sawdust from the high school wood shop, and another containing shredded white paper from school offices.

Oleson and Martin measured paper and sawdust into the food scraps before emptying the mixture into the middle compost bin. They gave the bin a couple of spins to mix what they’d added into the compost material from the rest of the week.

The decomposition process takes four weeks from start to finish, Randles said. In the second week, the temperature in the compost peaks at up to 140 degrees, gradually cooling to air temperature over the next two weeks.

At this point, the mixture has become soil with a few visible paper shreds and chunks of wood. As a final step, the soil is emptied onto a pile contained by a wooden fence, where earthworms help break composted organics into even richer soil.  

“It’s a good thing because here at the school, we eat a lot of food that eventually gets thrown away,” said sixth-grader Zane Durr.

“I never bothered with composting much and I never thought recycling was very important,” said Dayton Long. Long said he always thought of recycling as something people did who were overly concerned with the planet “being perfect.”

“I thought they were exaggerating until I got into it. Then I actually thought it was really cool.”

Sixth-grade teacher Bentz said the composting program had provided opportunities to integrate other lessons. Students determined how much paint was needed to coat the exterior of the composting shed as part of a math unit on figuring surface area.

Composting and the way organic matter breaks down will figure into upcoming discussions of the food web and of food chains, Bentz said, and a unit on plants will examine the plants rooted in compost produced at the school.

Randles said she hoped next spring to plant a garden behind the composting shed where students could grow a couple food in the compost. The school’s kitchen has agreed to use whatever food the students grow, she said.